Normal practice in this blog is to share interesting cases of where people have put machine vision to work. Today I’m going to do it slightly differently: I’m going to show you a situation where they should be using machine vision.
“Laser coding plastic fuel tanks,” (published on the OptoIQ website, May 1st, 2011,) describes an automotive laser marking application. In this case a fiber laser is being used to etch a regular 1-D (like vertical fence posts) barcode on a black plastic gas tank. All well and good, until one get’s to the part that says, “… 2D would be more reliable, but they would have to change production line scanner controllers, which are not 2D capable.”
So rather than adopt a more robust means of encoding data, which would let them write more data and potentially improve traceability of what is a safety-critical component, the company prefers to stick with their old 1-D scanners. That seems a strange decision. Why not be proactive and offer the customers 2D coding? I know the auto industry and I know the big players are moving towards ever tighter traceability (not quite pharma level, but heading that direction.) Come to that, I thought the AIAG was pushing for greater adoption of 2D coding. Isn’t that why they have standards for code reading and verification?
Cognex, Microscan, call this company and tell them what 2D code readers can do.
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1 comment:
I believe they know what 2D can do, but replacing barcode scanners isn't most probably plug'n'play operation. New type readers need to mechanically, electrically and data format fitted to legacy systems. If they have machines in line from multiple vendors maybe even by reader-by-reader basis.
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